Companies, such as traditional communications network service providers (e.g., wireline service providers, cellular service providers, cable service providers, satellite service providers, etc.), application-specific service providers, and other types of companies face great competitive pressure to provide the best service to their customers and to develop and deploy new services to the marketplace faster than their competitors.
Furthermore, major telecommunication providers, cable network carriers and other types of service providers may have extremely large legacy networks in place, which may service thousands or millions of customers. The array of legacy products and services provided by these carriers can be large and complex. Also, the type of customers may be diverse. For example, a customer base may vary from small single site voice and data customers up to the largest multi-national corporations which subscribe to hundreds of legacy services across tens, hundreds or even thousands of locations worldwide. Furthermore, legacy network infrastructures of telecommunication providers may span tens of thousands of central office wire centers worldwide.
To keep up with demand and to provide the level of service required by many customers, new infrastructures need to be rolled out and customers should be migrated to these new infrastructures. For example, internet protocol (IP) and extremely high-capacity, fiber optic networks may be mandatory for providing the level of service required or desired by many customers. As a result, service providers may be faced with undergoing a comprehensive analysis to enable educated decisions for the rapid creation and deployment of telecommunication networks and services that meet their customer demands, minimize service disruption during rollout, and provide the highest quality of service within the customer demands. However, due to the cost, difficulty and know-how needed for undergoing such an analysis, many companies may fall short in their analysis, possibly resulting in failure to meet customer demands, failure to improve quality of service, failure to maximize revenue and failure to minimize customer loss.